Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General About the "evil" path.

Hi people, i haven't paid attention to this since patch 3/4.

Has there been any talk about improving or altering current evil/goblin/absolute/murderhobo route of the game?

Last time i played it felt lacking and missing "middle" part going from meeting Mithara to immediately assaulting the grove. Not to mention full of red flags for most non-murderhobo players.

Nope, thank gods it stayed as it was.

What was the initial concern about the evil path? Humor my curiocity, please.

When i tried it, atleast for me, there were a few problems with it.

1) It's essentially:
You meet Mithara
option one) Assault the grove
option two) Decline and start the Fight

For me it's missing so sort of middle part of the story and goes into "hur dur me kill" kind of evil. Not to mention loot is bad too.

2)Every step of getting to Minthara essentially screams "You gonna get betrayed". First you can rescue a goblin to get in easier, tries to backstab you. Every major npc, involved with the goblins, tries to off the party in so way after learning about the tadpole. Even at the end and unless you pass a check you don't really get anything. I fail to see how character of any alignment would go that route. It's more beneficial to stick with the druid in the long run.

3)It closes off more plot that the druid path. Wyll outright leaves, Gale leaves if you fail a check, Shadowheart romance fails(?) and few more currently unavailable characters will leave too.
Not to mention there are lot of dead named Tiefling, who i think will matter more in the upcoming story that the goblins.

TL,DR
The evil path feels abrupt, you lose a lot more doing it and hard to logically justify doing it as any intelligent character.

Why? It's genuinely bad, and not in the way it's supposed to be.

The way I see it :

Neutral/Good path : you fight in order to survive/free yourself from the tadpole, maybe doing some good in the process.

Evil path : you fight for ultimate power 😈⚡. People aren't just going to hand it to you. Especially not evil people, goblins or drows. I don't know what else you expected? You want to be on top. Climbing = killing and/or cunning (ie : Persuasion checks).

And of course the companions would react to it. Actions have consequences.

So...in my opinion, it makes sense the way it is.

At least BG3 evil path isn't riddled with "(evil) (attack) I dont like you, die!" like Pathfinder is. This was the cheesiest thing as it is a very common punchline in these games.

In Pathfinder's Defence, those options aren't really a solid "evil path" like BG3 has. Those are just options to let you play a murderhobo. I'm not a fan of that kind of playstyle, but even the evil paths they do provide at least have other kinds of evil as well as that.

I disagree. Absolute is show to be able to mindcontrol people via the tadpole. No character would want it, before a way to resist is discovered. So it should be priority to get rid of it by all intelligent characters.

About power, yes. But Absolute wants the player character dead. And ordered Mintara to stab MC when they sleep even if they helped with the druids. Trying to join that is somewhat stupid. And even if player join there is always that mindcontrol lurking close by.


This one is bit of a meta problem for me, because by joining goblins/ absolute i lose more than i gain. Be it plot or items.

For me the issue is the lack of true motive and substance in-between.

• As far as the good path goes, the party's motivation in getting answers and becoming purified aligns with other NPCs along the way, so everything falls in place and feels cohesive.
• As far as the evil path goes though, there's no true motive nor meaningful reward behind the decision to join Minthara, in fact it feels contradictory to the whole purpose of the journey so it ends up feeling as just; "Hey, you have a choice to be evil here. Feel free to take it if you want". Especially because Halsin is right there in the cages holding all the answers and a possibility of a cure, so why are we suddenly going against our very purpose when we haven't established yet the potential gain from the Absolute's side.

In order to make the evil path have substance, it needs to establish a proper motive and goal for our party. Whether that is more answers and true insight from a real follower of the Absolute, deeper infiltration into the Absolute circle, the possibility to join the Absolute willingly, a quicker and safer way to Moonrise or even power itself. It needs something that weighs against the original motive of the party and it needs to be just as rewarding as the good path. But I don't know if we will get that in Early Access.

For me the only true reward for an evil path would be getting Minthara as a true companion with full romance, as compensation for Wyll leaving. I found her romance to be very sweet, especially with her wishing to take us as a consort to Menzoberranzan and belonging to each other for eternity. That to me would be the only meaningful reward for the evil path, but it still lacks true motive.

Of course I did some simplification about the paths. You could absolutly have evil characters not wanting the tadpole's power.
But if you choose to side with Minthara...AND raid the grove, then it fits with the rest.

We don't know that.

I think it's normal to not have equal gains depending on choices. Otherwise, what's the point of being able to make choices if it's all the same afterward? But that's my view on it Especially since it's just Act 1 (and EA)

That being said. How would you "fix" it then? Do you have suggestion?

This sounds good and all, but it doesn't hide the fact that the Evil path (siding with the goblins) has significantly less content than siding with the Teiflings/Druids. Less sidequests, less rewards, less story content, less companions, less romance options, and generally less flexibility and variety of outcomes. The overall writing of it is also the subject of much debate as to its relative quality which bears drawing attention to, IMO.

Difficulty is one thing, and can be considered a good thing for those that enjoy challenges. (personally, I'd argue that the good path has more and more challenging fights than the evil path so far) But lack of content & questionable writing is another, pretty much always undesirable thing. Give more items to good npcs such as in the grove that can only be gotten by killing them to counterbalance the plethora of loot that gets thrown at you for playing a good character. Give party members and romance options (besides Minthara) that you don't get by siding with the grove. Give some actual sidequests linked to the goblin camp. Ones that don't set off the grove siege after completing them. Clean up the writing so it's more cohesive.

While we are on it, rewrite the option to help Kahga and implement an option to help the Shadow druids. The resolution to either of those options just screams 'cut content'.

@Crimsomrider and @Leucrotta : I hear you. I think maybe there could be some extra content for "the evil path" but after Act1?


Maybe...or it just screams EA?

Excellent analysis.

Quite honestly ... i would hate it.
All motivation you need is right there, its simply not just explicitly said to you ... you sort of have to figure it out yourself.

I mean, yes Good path is obviously presented to you, shown, you are aimed towards it by other characters ... that makes sense, bcs they need you ... and in the proces you can benefit fromit aswell.
But Evil path is completely different, that is not something that is presented to you, nobody will offer it and nobody SHOULD offer it ... its an opourtunity ... and you either get it, or not.

Personaly i love this.

Also many people (willingly?) ignore several stuff around Evil path, just to make it look bad ... while their arguments dont really makes sense.
Take few examples:

- People keep talking about how saving Halsin is the only logical approach, bcs you *need* to get rid of your tadpole ... except you dont ... for example Astarion dont want it gone, its beneficial for him to keep it, all he want gone is risk that he will turn into humanoid squid.
> Nobody in the Absolute Cult shows any sign of turning ... therefore, from knowledge about regular ceremorphosis that our character can have ... we can presume that IF we live on borrowed time, they were tadpoled before us ... and therefore will also turn before us ... logicaly then, as long as we keep around Ragzlin, Minthara and Gut and see that they are all fine, we have nothing to fear.
> Even futher, it seems like people in cult of the Absolute have nothing to fear from Tadpole ... again, logical opourtunity is to mix between them and investigate their secret ... but to do that, we need to be willing to play along with them > in this case then masacring the Grove is just means to an end.
As we say in Czech: When a forest is felled, chips fly around.

- Another often used argument is that Minthara was "told by the Absolute to kill us" ...
I mean, this isnt exactly true ... all we can say for sure is that Minthara "said that the Absolute demands our death" i know its not much difference, but bare with me:
The important part here is "Minthara said" ... bcs if you check her speach a little more thoroughly, soon you find out that as any proper fanatic, even her claims that all her actions are directly ordered by the Absolute ... and if you persuate her to let you go, she litteraly sais that "The Absolute wants to test you" ...
One must ask how? Few seconds later she demanded our death and now she want us to go to Moonrise towers?
The only logical explanation here is that Minthara dont actualy get any instruction at all, she simply presumes that the Absolute would let her know if anything she wants to do would be against her wishes ... and everything she dont deny, is acording to her will and wishes.
> Therefore this argument is simple missundersanding of Minthara speach style.

- Finaly (to present at least three) there is that motivation argument ...
As stated abowe, the Absolute cant really invite us to her cult, while offering some power ... that would simply ruin that whole experience. :-/
Nah, the cult is just there ... we see that there is a chance to infiltrate them, for whatever reason, with whatever goal in mind ... and its up to us, we can try it and maaaaaaybe benefit from it ... or not, that just risk of the job.
If there would be clearly established path, with specificaly stated rewards at the end ... it would be completely different story. :-/

- And one bonus argument ... loot.
This one is especialy funny to me, since you never know what loot you will get ... so logicaly loot can never affect your decisions, from roleplay perspective ofcourse.
But even so ... there is nothing stoping you to go to Goblin camp, kill them all and loot their corpses even if you join them ... so, basicaly if loot is all you care about, you can have it all.
The only item you cant get in Evil path, is that helm you get from Zevlor.

You and I clearly have very different definitions of sweet, but otherwise I agree there's a significant gap in the game's recognition of and ability to roleplay different flavours of the side-with-goblins path, and I hope that's going to get fleshed out in the full release.

As you point out, there are various possible reasons why you might (pretend to) side with Minthara, and I'd suggest infiltrating the cult is one of the most promising paths. You may already know from talking to Nettie that Halsin doesn't really know what's going on, so whether he can help is doubtful and getting in with the cult may seem like a safer bet. Even though the True Souls you meet are unaware of their tadpoles, it's not unreasonable to think that if you can make your way deeper into the heart of the conspiracy then eventually you'll find someone in on the secret.

I disagree with RagnarokCzD that infiltrating the cult of the Absolute (which may later turn into joining the cult of the Absolute) shouldn't be recognised as a genuine path, and would prefer it were recognised in the journal as you start to find out more about the cult and its connection with the tadpoles, along with finding Halsin or the githyanki creche and all the other dead ends. Plus it would be good to have a level of confidence that this was a fleshed out option in the game - it's one thing to take a risk on a course of action that may not play out because of in-world factors, it's another to risk role playing an option that turns out not to be available or satisfying because it hasn't been written.

I'd also like to be able to discuss my rationale with my companions and hear what they think of it, good or bad. I wouldn't expect Wyll to decide to stick around no matter what the motivation for attacking the grove, but it would be good to be able to at least say to him or the others that infiltrating the cult is your best bet or give any of the other possible reasons why you may have done it. To Shadowheart, the closest I could get was to tell her we needed to clear the way forward, which isn't really the same. I think it was only Volo to whom I could say that I needed to gain the cult's trust (and, by the way, I'm not generally a Volo fan, but I think his speech to an MC who has betrayed the grove is *excellent* and cut me to the quick).

Others have already pointed out that agreeing to support Minthara seems to come out of the blue, and could do with a bit more build up. And we should at least have the opportunity to ask why she wants the grove destroyed - is it the tieflings, the druids, or both that they want dead? Is there something at the grove they're trying to find? Is it Halsin, and they don't realise he's the bear in their dungeon?

I'd also have found it more satisfying to have had the opportunity to deceive Minthara into believing I was on her side, and also that I was "hers" in the romance scene afterwards which my main character definitely wasn't. Her tadpole should give her some opportunity of spotting your insincerity, and choosing a deception option would have a different feel to me as a player even if, on success, the outcome was the same as just joining her.

In my playthrough, I was also trying to roleplay a character who wanted to infiltrate the cult but also undermine them at every turn where he wouldn't be discovered. He killed Gut, poisoned the goblins in the courtyard, subverted the spiders in the pit, and even freed Halsin, but it's not clear that any of that made any difference to the fight at the grove or anything else. He was doing this for Lolth, but I can imagine a neutral or even at a push a chaotic good character making similar choices in the belief this is the best and only way to bring down those responsible for the attacks on the Sword Coast and regretfully seeing the deaths of some innocents as being a price worth paying.

I'd also like there to be more nuance and complexity to the attack on the grove than just a wholesale slaughter. For example: the adult tieflings in Zevlor’s cave just throw themselves at you, instead some could attack to cover the retreat of others up the rockface and through the hatch where Lakrissa(?) is found earlier, and Minthara could send you after them giving you the opportunity to then let them go and deceive Minthara that they'd been too quick or to slaughter them. Or, if you know how to get into Mol's hideout, have the option to either tell the goblins how to get in or say you don't know. Or when going to deal with the druids, to give them the opportunity to complete the Rite of Thorns if they still have the idol and deceive Minthara that they'd already completed it when you got there. There would clearly be risks to leaving so many people alive with good reason to hate you, and there's a a good chance that tieflings would get killed in the wilderness anyway. But I'd like the opportunity either to reinforce my characters evil-ness by repeatedly choosing to kill people, or mitigate at least some of the impact of my pragmatic decision to work with the cult.

I think it might have been in a different thread that someone said that in many cases, good or evil comes down to *why* you do things rather than simply what you do, so when it doesn't give you opportunity to roleplay the why of decisions the game is missing something really important. I'm not in favour of siding with the goblins being a clearly laid out "evil path" as such, I agree with RagnarokCzD that would be boring and whether you do so or not there should be a branching set of options with different moral nuances. But whichever choice is made, the players should feel that the game is recognising their motivations as well as their actions. It could be that those motivations in the end don't make any difference, and that even a somewhat non-evil character who sides with the goblins to destroy the cult from within has to become increasingly morally compromised or fail. But if the game was exactly the same experience for that character as for someone who thought joining the Absolute for power was just a fantastic idea from the get-go, and all that roleplay had to be in our heads, I'd not find that satisfying at all.

Well said, lots of good ideas there. I’ve experimented in similar ways but you’ve also given me some new ideas.

its been stated that players don't want the evil path because their data minning shows us picking the good path... in my case i always play the good path each patch to test for bugs then play evil next to enjoy

I still hesitate to call siding with Minthara for the grove invasion the evil path, because as I’ve said I think there are reasons why some non-evil characters would do it, and reasons why some evil characters wouldn’t.

But either way, I hope that if the numbers are skewing heavily towards siding with the grove, which wouldn’t surprise me, Larian recognise that’s at least partly because they’ve not yet done enough to make the alternative compelling for enough players. I think this thread shows that if it were done better, then more of us would be interested in exploring it.

Put yourself in the role of an evil character. You crash on the beach, meet some people you are tolerating because it's necessary to survive. You get to this sappy grove full of annoying Leave it to Beaver tieflings and even more annoying paranoid druids. You meet Nettie who really doesn't offer any solutions except drink a poison and die. You meet a goblin in a cage who tells you she'll introduce you to her leaders, and you learn that they may have all the answers to your problems. Halsin MIGHT help you, but the cult actually KNOWS what's happening. If you help the cult, YOU might get to know too.

All you have to do is help Minthara butcher a bunch of people who you find annoying anyway.

And then, as time goes by, you begin to discover that there are some serious benefits to accepting the tadpole powers, AND you might actually not transform into a mind flayer. Someone, the Absolute, has found a way to control ceremorphosis. If you learn how she did it, YOU could control it and harness those powers, and your dream lover is actually promising you such things... And more.

Sure. Seems like an obvious setup and you'll probably be used and tossed into a heap, but if you think you're clever enough to outsmart the Absolute and her minions, you can play along with their game until the time is right to stab them in the back.

I think the issue with the evil path is that players aren't really feeling this. It's there, but the red flags are too obvious. It's like Shadowheart being a Sharran. It's too obvious. So players feel like they aren't really tempted to be evil. They have to force themselves to do it in order to experience it.

That's why I'm a total advocate for Larian creating more circumstances where players have to make seriously tough choices. Do I use the tadpole powers to accomplish this seemingly very important thing here, or do I avoid the powers and let that thing go even if it could be a detriment to me? And serious lures for evil characters. Do I use the tadpole powers to gain this really powerful spell/magic item, or let it go and live without it? But more than just using tadpole powers, we need more serious motivations for a lot of things. Do I kill Nettie so I can acquire this really awesome Drow weapon she found on his corpse? Do I join the cult and slaughter the druids because I discovered that Kagha has some sort of Intel on the Absolute and she's not sharing... Or maybe Zevlor has said Intel and if I help the Shadow Druids I might be able to kill Zevlor and take said Intel from his cold, dead hands?

That's what I think people are trying to get at here.